A Conversation with TuneCore’s Jamie Purpora – HuffPost 10.11.13
Mike Ragogna: Jamie, how long have you been working for TuneCore?
Jamie Purpora: I started in March of 2011.
MR: And what are your primary duties?
JP: I run the publishing administration division.
MR: What does that entail?
JP: Basically, TuneCore was a distribution platform, a very successful one, and the artists were often songwriters who didn’t have any representation for their publishing rights. I was at Bug Music for seventeen years running all of their admin, and TuneCore approached me to build an admin model for their customers.
MR: Bug Music, right. You have a history of being artist and writer friendly, don’t you.
JP: Yep, you got it.
MR: [laughs] Jamie, are artists that come to you already established or…?
JP: In the beginning, TuneCore was an avenue to get your music released. As you know, in the old days, we sold our CDs and cassettes out of the back of cars or even used websites to sell them. So TuneCore was built so that for an upfront yearly subscription fee, we’ll put your songs on Apple, Amazon, Rhapsody, now Spotify, and countless other digital platforms to make your music available to everyone. That’s one copyright, and that’s one way that artists and songwriters make money, through the sales of their downloads or physical records or streams, et cetera. With the publishing administration platform, there’s a separate right for you as the songwriter and publisher that generates revenue as well. To pick up that revenue is much more complicated than a direct store relationship. When you distribute stuff through iTunes, you give it to Apple, Apple gives you the money, you give it to the artist. Through the publishing rights, due to the different laws of publishing around the world it’s a more complicated thing to get. You have to have the songs registered outside of the store. It’s a completely different pathway to shake the trees for that money. So the basis, the first initial point of this was to do that so everyone could get what they were due. The second point was the creative element of publishing, which is two-shot songs for film and TV uses to basically protect them by having the songs registered prior to the sales, which is even better. It’s a combined effort to basically support the songwriter along with the distribution. So those two copyrights are covered.
MR: Am I wrong or does this seem to benefit more established artists than not?
JP: No, no, it benefits all. Every time your song is downloaded on iTunes outside of the States, there’s a royalty that’s separate from the sale revenue, that’s for the composition. Millions and millions of dollars are sitting because nobody has representation. You couldn’t go to Warner or Capitol and get an admin deal if you sold a few thousand units. They’re not going to answer the phone. This way, you sign up, and we built it online. At Bug, I had maybe ten or fifteen administration deals we did a month and they were all paper. Every publisher did it in paper form. We’ve built this online, and we’re getting five to six hundred signups a month.
MR: But that is somebody who has assets they’ve already taken to a certain point in order to accrue royalties. Does TuneCore also assist the new artist in trying to help them figure out a way to place their assets so royalties can build?
JP: Yes, absolutely. If you also distribute through TuneCore, you have our admins build a licensing website that we’ve made available to all of the TV and film supervisors. It’s sortable by genre and it’s a one-stop shop. Usually, any of these places where you can license the publishing and the master recording together are usually libraries; this is all original music. It has over a hundred and fifty thousand copyrights in it right now, which we’re scanning through and that just launched in July.
MR: Is there a certain fee that people have to pay in order for you to be working this stuff?
JP: No, it’s part of the administration agreement.
MR: Then is the paradigm of TuneCore one has to listen to the music and decide, “Yeah, we can do something with this,” therefore similar to the old school way of doing it?
JP: No, no, it goes in there. It’s up to the film supervisors.
MR: I understand that, but say I’m an artist and I come to you and I want to put something up online. What do I do? I contact you after I put up a video on YouTube or after I have a Soundcloud upload, et cetera? It seems like you have to be in a place of at least some success in order to accrue significant royalties.
JP: Well, again, it was built as a distribution from the beginning, to get the things out there. It’s a DIY artists’ platform. What the publishing administration thing does is not only make sure you get what you should get as a songwriter and publisher, but at the same time, it’s making your songs available to the people that want it in a TV show or on a commercial or in a film. We don’t vet it as far as whether we think it’s good or not. It’s the supervisors who go through there. We’ve made it sortable by genre, all those types of things.
MR: Do a song or artist’s prior success come into play at all?
JP: Not necessarily because we’ve had things that aren’t big sellers, but they happen to be what the supervisor was looking for when they just came out. It’s not really about anything except for helping these songs find the right place and doing it in a way that helps thousands of people instead of a couple hundred. We’ve built a digital world where basically we put everything out there for the film and TV community to sort through and find what they need.
MR: All right, so I am a music director for a film and I want to go to TuneCore, what do I do? Walk me through it.
JP: We’ve most likely already hit you up and invited you to the site. If not, you basically get a username and password because this is only open to the supervisors. You sign in and then you can search by genre. You see who’s doing well on iTunes in the catalog this week and since inception. You can also choose by genre and several other things–by artist, by songwriter if you already know they’re a TuneCore writer or artist–and it gives you those options. You’re looking for something to replace something else with and that’s usually the case with those guys. This helps people find that stuff.
MR: So lately you guys are doing something new in the publishing area. Can you go into that?
JP: Yeah, what’s new about it is it’s basically available to everyone. You can sign up no matter who you are as long as you have something out there or if you’re getting ready to put something out there you can sign up and do it. There’s no longer a gatekeeper; we took the gates out. Anybody can get in and we shake the trees for your money. We register your songs in over sixty countries, and we register them within a week. Also, there’s back money. If you’ve had sales over the years, some places will go back five years and get that revenue for you. Most people don’t realize they even miss it. We had one writer that got four thousand dollars out of Canada instantly.
MR: What do you think is the future for TuneCore? Where do you think you’ll be expanding from here?
JP: It’ll expand into YouTube monetization, it’ll expand into whatever road music goes down. Right now, streaming is heavy, streaming is part of the future; YouTube is heavy, YouTube is part of the future, it’s wherever it will go. Helping artists get their music to those places, one, and two, helping them manage the rights to their music, which is the pub admin side. If you don’t have representation, it’s not going to be as successful and you’re not trying to reap the benefits of your work. It’s really that simple. I’m a musician too. I’ve been doing that for twenty-five years in LA. I’ve been working in this business for over twenty years and I’ve seen it; artists can come and go but the publishing rights and the administration still generates them revenue years later. You never know when something’s going to pop up. You never know when all of a sudden, someone starts using something that, for the most part, no one was paying attention to and then something breaks loose. Its revenue keeps going on and on and on. What artists don’t realize is they think they get money just from live or from sales. There’s also publishing, there’s merchandising. There are so many pieces and all of those pieces together are what help make an artist successful. We’re tying most of those pieces together in one place.
MR: Nice. This now ties into my traditional question that I have for everybody. I think we just got some, but what advice do you have for new artists?
JP: Find your audience. We’re giving you the tools to be represented and to be distributed and possibly even to be discovered by the film and TV community, but you have to find your audience. Whether it means you have to play a bunch of local gigs, whether it means you have to push harder on a social media platform, you have to find your audience, you have to find who likes you. Once you find that, I think that’s the key. It used to be that the record label would help expose you to your audience. Now that the gates are down and the “record store” shelves are endless, you have an opportunity to take advantage of that by using social media platforms to find your audience. That’s the key. Where you’re playing, who you’re playing for and who you’re pushing your music to is ultimately what’s going to help you succeed, I think.
MR: Do you see anything on the horizon that’s yet another source of income for writers and publishers?
JP: I think it’s a combination of all these things. I think it’s not just one thing. Like the economy, you don’t point at one thing that made it go bad for a minute or made it get better. It’s a combination of all of those things. There are thirteen royalty types just for the composition of a song that was written. You secure yourself through all of those; you make sure you register everywhere and you make sure of the publisher of the record and the songwriter of the record everywhere that could possibly generate revenue. You hedge your bets that way and by having an administrator you’re covered that way. Nobody knows what’s going to come up next but by having everything protected, registered and set you’re going to be in a good spot when that does happen.
For more information: http://www.tunecore.com
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne